What is sex? What is gender? What is sexuality? What do we mean by LGBTQIA? How are these concepts related to the workplace? How have our understandings of these terms changed over time, and how have these changes impacted work and culture? To help you answer these important questions, this course will introduce you to the exciting field of gender, sexuality, and women's studies, and to LGBTQIA identities. We will use a range of interdisciplinary concepts, tools, and methods to understand and analyze how identity shapes our experiences in culture and in the workplace. Because we all live with gender expectations, this course is crucial for any profession, and for understanding the world around us. Also, you will learn key concepts that will help you to interpret and understand the world we share.

From the lesson

Trans Topics Today and Trans in Theory

This week, you will learn about the evolution of understanding about transgender people’s lives and identities, exploring the long history of gender transgression across different cultural contexts, and talk about the ways we understand gender transgression to function. We then discuss how those who identify outside the gender binary present important challenges to fixed ways of being/thinking about gender. Finally, we examine the ways that transgender individuals have faced and surmounted oppression in the workplace (also known as genderism, a term coined by Riki Wilchins), and the kinds of laws that are designed to protect their rights.